


Homecoming, One

by aladygrieve



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Mid-Credits Scene, Cuddling and Snuggling, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Torture, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 16:43:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6964906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aladygrieve/pseuds/aladygrieve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seventy years ago and fifty years ago and two years ago and last month and right now, home is the man Bucky will always go back to, even when he doesn’t know his own name. </p><p>Or, Bucky wakes up and re-examines his past in an effort to rid himself of the Winter Soldier’s trigger words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homecoming, One

**Prologue**

The Winter Soldier is used to the feeling of waking up. His skin tingles as he gradually regains sensation in his fingers and toes, then up his legs and the one arm that is constructed of flesh and bone instead of metal. They’ve woken him like this countless times; another day, another mission. Any second now, the fog in his head will clear completely. He opens his eyes -

\- and his vision floods with the clean white light of a Wakandan medical centre. He is not the Winter Soldier. He is Bucky Barnes. There is no metal arm, not anymore. As his eyes adjust, the cryochamber opens and a face comes into focus, dark against the sterile brightness of the lab.

“How long?” Bucky asks. His voice is rough, like it used to be after a night on the town with a dame on each arm. He’d wanted at least a month, but he wouldn’t put it past T’Challa to wake him up sooner, especially if Steve had had anything to say about it.

“You have been in suspended animation for nearly six weeks, as we agreed,” T’Challa replies. “Sergeant Barnes -”

“My name is Bucky.”

“Of course, my apologies — Bucky.” Bucky decides he likes the way his childhood nickname sounds in T’Challa’s smooth, rich voice. It makes the warrior king seem a little more human.

“Where’s Steve?” Bucky asks.

“Outside. He is eager to see you, but we wanted to ensure there were no — complications.”

Bucky flexes the fingers of his right hand and takes a step out of the glass chamber. His legs are a little wobbly, and the lack of a counterbalance on his left side throws him off somewhat, but he’s able to find solid footing on the linoleum floor, which is cool against his bare feet.

“And have there been? Complications?”

T’Challa frowns slightly, considering. “Your vital signs are normal. Well, they are normal for you. As far as we can tell, you pose no danger to yourself or anyone else, for the present.” Bucky hoists himself up onto a metal table, dangling his legs over the edge.

“Can you fix me?”

“We believe so. We have a theory, but testing it requires that you are conscious. Captain Rogers can help explain it.”

“Then let him in.”

T’Challa smiles then, and the warmth of it lights up his face. “Doctor,” he calls to a woman who is standing at a computer in the corner of the lab, “please open the door before the Captain breaks it down.”

The doctor nods, pressing a button. There’s a soft hiss as the lab door slides on its track, and Steve is through before it’s even open all the way.

He looks…all right, Bucky thinks. His close-cropped blond hair has gained a little length on the top and sides, and several weeks’ worth of stubble has grown in around his strong jaw. Bucky’s never seen Steve wear a beard before, and it suits him. But there are shadows under his eyes that were definitely not there six weeks ago. He’s drawn and a little too pale, and his mouth is pressed into a thin, worried line.

Steve crosses the lab in three long strides, but once he’s standing in front of the table, he hangs back a few paces. He searches Bucky’s face — for what exactly, Bucky doesn’t know — but he seems to want Bucky to make the first move.

“I’m okay, Steve,” Bucky says, smiling. “Really.”

Then Steve’s arms are around him, one at his shoulder and one at his hip, and Bucky can feel the soft scratch of his beard against his cheek. Bucky’s arm is tight around Steve back, and as Steve stands between Bucky’s bent knees, they are of a height.

“I missed you, jerk,” Steve says softly against his neck. “Never do that again.”

“You’re a punk,” Bucky shoots back at him, and it’s wonderfully familiar, the way they slip into this old routine. It reminds Bucky of how they had talked about their memories in the quinjet. Even with what they knew they were about to face, Steve had managed to crack a dumb joke about being old. That had always been his way. Now they could be back at the 1942 World Expo, except this time they’re saying hello instead of goodbye. Bucky prefers hello.

“T’Challa says you have a way to get the words out of me,” he prompts.

Steve lets him go, taking a step back so he’s leaning against another table. “Maybe.”

“The Captain insisted that we make your recovery a priority,” T’Challa says, and Steve has the good grace to look a little sheepish. “We are fairly confident that it will work. A team of the best neurochemists and psychiatrists in this country — quite possibly the best in any country — has been working on it since we put you under.”

The woman who has been tinkering away at the computer for several minutes looks up, smiling. Her brown eyes are kind, and Bucky recognizes her as one of the team who helped put him in cryofreeze. “Your Highness, you flatter us,” she says, coming over to join them.

“Doctor Subira Okoye has been leading the team,” T’Challa says. “Doctor, could you explain your theory?”

Dr. Okoye nods. “We believe it’s quite simple,” she tells Bucky. “HYDRA used a combination of drugs, hypnosis and torture to hardwire the words into your brain over the course of a few decades. We’re still unsure exactly how they did it, but we think they started with your birth year, which Captain Rogers tells me was 1917. They counted the numbers backward — seventeen, nine, one — and used that as a framework on which to build your conditioning. The rest of the words came later.”

Bucky knows what Dr. Okoye is saying is more or less true. He’s still a little hazy on the details of his conditioning — his torture, when it comes right down to it — which is probably for the best. He remembers the broad strokes though, and he remembers when and why each word was implanted into him. He’d told T’Challa as much of it as he could remember before he was frozen, and he knows they got what they could out of Helmut Zemo before he was turned over to the CIA.

“Why would they count backward?” Steve asks.

“It could be any number of reasons,” Dr. Okoye replies. “I think it was meant as a way of symbolically removing Bucky’s essential self piece by piece so they could replace it with their conditioning.”

Dr. Okoye doesn’t stumble or hesitate when she says Bucky’s name, nor does she seem at all afraid of him. Bucky is growing to like her more and more by the minute.

“HYDRA seemed to have a liking for the symbolic,” she continues. “Which is lucky for us, because it means the conditioning should be easier to break. Each word in the sequence — other than the numbers, which are just the framework — is associated with a specific memory or feeling, and then burned into neurochemical pathways in your brain with torture. Electroconvulsive therapy, or shock treatment as you may know it, was newly invented at the time and was probably part of what they used. It would have also had the side benefit of erasing your memories.”

For the briefest instant, Bucky sees a flash of bright spotlights glaring above him, and feels heavy leather straps around his wrists, waist and ankles. He shakes his head and the image clears as suddenly as it appeared.

“Bucky, are you all right?” Steve asks him, concern flashing across his eyes. Zemo was right — there is some green in them. But it’s not a flaw.

“I’m fine, sorry,” Bucky says. He turns to Dr. Okoye. “What were you saying?”

“We cannot remove the words from your brain entirely,” she says, looking at him intently. Bucky knows his momentary slip was not lost on her either. “But we may be able to, in a sense, reprogram them - overwrite their meaning so they can no longer be used to control you.”

“How?”

“The same way HYDRA did, essentially,” Dr. Okoye says. “Except where they did it with pain, we’ll do it with pleasure. There is evidence of biological connections between the neurochemical pathways that perceive both sensations. Our plan is to dose you with dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin — bog-standard happiness chemicals — and trigger the release of endorphins, then have you re-associate the words with new feelings and memories. Because the conditioning is so keyed in to the significance of the words and the meaning you assign them, overwriting the meaning should overwrite the conditioning.”

“Should?”

“Almost certainly will,” the doctor says firmly. “I have done my homework, Bucky. Theoretically, it would work if we removed just one word in the sequence, but we’re going to err on the side of caution and reprogram them all, so this will probably take some time, and some assistance from Tony Stark.”

Dr. Okoye picks up what appears to be a pair of glasses.

“Stark?” Bucky asks.

“He’s coming around, Buck,” Steve says. “He’s not ready to see either of us yet — he’s broken four phones already. But I think he’s starting to accept that it wasn’t your fault.”

“I have spoken to Mr. Stark often over the last few weeks,” T’Challa adds. “I reminded him that he is not the only person whose enmity toward you was based on a mistruth.”

“He allowed us access to his technology, which he invented to rewrite traumatic memories,” Dr. Okoye says. “I have a feeling the only reason he let us use it is because he doesn’t think it really works, but we’ve made several improvements over the last few weeks. With these, you’ll be able to revisit the memories and feelings originally associated with the words and replace them with new ones. You won’t be altering your memories, just shifting their focus.”

Bucky grimaces. He doesn’t like the sound of going back to the old memories, but if it means getting rid of his programming, he’s willing to try it. Dr. Okoye coughs delicately. “We can also use targeted ECT to clear some of the memories of your actions as the Winter Soldier.”

“No,” Bucky snaps.

“I’m sorry?”

Bucky sits a little taller.

“If you mean making me forget the people I — I killed, then no,” he says, more firmly this time. “I’ll do the rest of it, but I’m done with forgetting. Even the bad stuff. Erasing the memories won’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“You’re sure?” Steve asks. “It might help.”

“I’m sure. And it won’t.”

“Very well,” Dr. Okoye says. “With your permission, we’ll start immediately.”

Within a few minutes, Bucky is lying on the cool table. He’s wearing Stark’s glasses and he’s hooked up to an IV and some electrodes, but for once, he isn’t strapped down. Dr. Okoye and her assistants bustle around him, preparing things he can’t see.

As the lab’s lights dim, Steve comes over to him and places his hand on Bucky’s intact shoulder. “Ready?” he asks.

“I’ve been ready for this for two years,” Bucky says. “No one is ever gonna make me hurt you again. Not sure how I feel about all these people knowing the words, though.”

“I trust T’Challa with my life, Bucky,” Steve replies. “More importantly, I trust him with yours. And he trusts his doctors, so I think we’re good. Besides, if everything goes well, the words won’t mean anything either way.”

“And if it doesn’t go well?” Bucky knows the only alternative he wants.

A muscle in Steve’s jaw clenches.

“Then we’ll put you back on ice until they figure out something else.”

“Promise me?”

“I promise.”

Then the room goes completely dark, and he hears Dr. Okoye’s voice behind him.

“We’re ready.”

**Longing/желание**

The reason this is the first word they used to break him is because it is what made them realize Bucky Barnes could be broken in the first place. The glasses take Bucky back, and just like a few minutes ago, he feels like he’s strapped to a cold metal table under blinding lights, somehow both watching it from across the room and experiencing it first hand. The image is so vivid he can smell the stink of unwashed human coming off his prone body.

As the faceless figures advance on him with their syringes and their surgical instruments, he screams Steve’s name. Over and over, until he goes hoarse and it feels like they’re being scraped out of his throat with a dull razor. It goes on for hours, for days, but that doesn’t matter because Steve will come. He came for him in Austria and he’ll come now, wherever the hell Bucky is, because Steve always comes for him.

That thought is what keeps him sane through months of torture, of being pumped full of chemicals and zapped with electric currents and beaten and starved and doused in icy water and forced to stand for hours at a time. He’s starting to forget his own name, but he still remembers Steve’s.

It takes him a long time to realize that Steve isn’t coming. It takes him even longer to accept it. They don’t tell him Captain America is dead. They tell him _Steve_ is dead, and that's so, so much worse. He doesn’t want to believe them, but they bring in a television and make him watch the American and British newsreels. He supposes even those could be fabricated, but somehow, he knows they aren’t.

“Why would we lie about this, Zimniy Soldat?” the runty little man called Zola asks him. “Why would we lie to you when the truth, I think, hurts you so much more than any story we could invent?”

His body slumps, and the fight goes out of him. Then the psychiatrist is fiddling absently with a ring on his finger. “Count with me, Zimniy Soldat,” he says softly, his flat, lightless eyes boring into him, and the Winter Soldier finds he can’t look away.

“Seventeen….nine…one.”

*        *       *

Decades later, Bucky still knows the ache of longing. The image shifts, and he is crammed into the back seat of a tiny blue car, watching Steve kiss that blonde woman whose name he can’t remember. He knows he should feel happy for Steve — how could he not be happy for his best friend, a man who was ignored by women most of his life? So Bucky smiles, but there’s a twinge of something else in his smile, and it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

It’s the same mixed-up feeling Bucky had more than seventy years ago, as a whole camp full of soldiers cheered Steve on and beautiful, brutal Peggy Carter looked at him with stars in her eyes. As soon as the thought comes into his mind, he’s there again.

As he always has, Bucky wants more than anything for Steve to get the respect, admiration and love he deserves. The problem, he now knows, is that for the longest time, Steve was a small and sickly nobody from Brooklyn and Bucky was the only one who realized how special he was. After the serum, Steve isn’t _his_ anymore. Everyone and their dog wants a piece of the Star-Spangled Man With a Plan. And the adoring crowds aren’t just trailing after Steve because he is _the_ Captain America, the handsome golden boy in tights earnestly selling war bonds to paying audiences across the country. Steve’s a real hero, and he’s putting himself in real danger to save others - to save Bucky. But Bucky is no longer the only one who respects, admires and loves Steve.

So as he shouts “Let’s hear it for Captain America!” the sour taste of it twists his grin downward until he’s practically glaring. Bucky knows he’s being selfish, knows he has no right to want to keep Steve to himself now that Steve’s outward appearance finally reflects everything he has always been on the inside, but he still does. It’s the same expression he wears as he watches Steve kiss the blonde woman — Sharon, that’s her name. He knows he’s supposed to be happy like Sam is happy, but here she is, yet another person with whom Bucky will have to share Steve.

Bucky doesn’t like sharing Steve. This is something he’s always known. And now that Steve’s got a whole team of people — friends — working with him and fighting with him and looking out for him, it’s something Bucky’s going to have to get used to. He doesn’t need to know Sam very long to resign himself to the fact that he’s going to have to share billing with him for the role of Steve’s best friend. As much as he and Sam bicker, Bucky has to admit that he’s a good guy. Their passive-aggressive griping is more out of principle at this point than genuine enmity; they both take shots for each other during Steve and Bucky’s escape from the Leipzig airport.

As for the rest them, well —Natasha, he knows. Their relationship is…complicated. He saw her — Natalia Alianovna — briefly when she was first taken in by the Red Room as a girl in the early nineties, and then again some fifteen years after that, when he looks exactly the same, but she is a woman grown. He helps train her, and as the months wear on, they realize that they both harbour a little suppressed desperation for touch that doesn’t hurt, so they go with it. A few years later, the Winter Soldier comes very close to killing her. Bucky doesn’t regret any of it. And yet despite initially siding with Stark, Natasha lets Bucky and Steve get to the quinjet. She holds T’Challa back so they can escape. Steve speaks fondly of her during the flight to Siberia, and Bucky knows that if anyone can keep Steve safe, it’s her.

Bucky doesn’t get much of a chance to speak to the others during the fight and then while they are on the run, but it’s obvious that they’re all ready to fight for Steve. They let themselves be imprisoned in the Raft for him, and that speaks volumes by itself. As much as he doesn’t like to share, Bucky’s glad that Steve’s got more people to look out for him now. Keeping Steve out of trouble is a full-time job.

**Rusted/ржaвый**

After a while, the focus of the Winter Soldier’s conditioning changes. His mind is fully theirs, has been for some time now, and it’s time to bring his body into similar line. The training is endless: he runs for miles, builds up pounds and pounds of muscle, learns to eliminate targets with grenades and knives and garroting cords and more kinds of guns than he can count. He is drilled until he can assemble, load and fire everything from an antique Colt revolver to the latest Kalashnikov quite literally with his eyes closed, but no matter how many he masters, the one he finds the easiest is the M1941 Johnson sniper rifle. They don’t question him when he mounts a custom scope on it.

His handlers make a particular point of teaching him the many and varied uses of the silvery limb now fused to the socket of his left shoulder. It can feel some pressure and temperature, enough that he knows it’s there, but it never hurts. It’s about the only part of him that doesn’t.

He learns over a dozen languages, but he doesn’t remember a time when Russian was not his mother tongue. He doesn’t remember a mother, either.

The Soldier’s first kill is an accident. He’s training in the bunker's hand-to-hand combat ring far below the Siberian sun, which is faint and weak in February's chill, even in the middle of the day. He executes a throw with perfect form, but his sparring partner stumbles on the landing. The man loses his footing and falls, and the side of his head slams into the rusted iron bars that surround the ring like a cage.

He doesn’t get up. His open eyes still carry a look of vague surprise. They move his body, but they never do clean up the blood, and eventually it dries to a dull brown that matches the rust stains on the bars. A new word is added to the sequence, an acknowledgement of his physical prowess, and from that point on, they have him leave a loaded pistol within arm’s reach of his handlers, in case the mission parameters should ever require his own termination. He doesn’t care.

*        *       *

Bucky hadn’t known that his arm was capable of rusting. It never did in the decades it was attached to his body, but when the force of Stark’s armour exploding rips most of it off, the internal wiring, circuitry, and metal components are exposed. Those parts, never meant to be exposed to the elements, apparently don’t take it very well. The Wakandan humidity does a number on them even in the few short days before Bucky goes under. They put a thin cover over the broken end, but the damage is done.

Before they seal him in the tube, they offer to build him a new arm, to remove the rust that starting to form on mangled stump, but he declines, at least for the time being. He figures there’s no point in making himself more dangerous than he already is.

Steve isn’t happy about his decision to go back into cryo. He seems shocked that Bucky would even want to. But while Bucky hates to cause Steve even more pain than he already has, this has to be his choice. That’s the whole reason he’s doing it: to minimize harm — to himself, to the people around him, and especially to Steve. He’d thought he was damn close to being Bucky Barnes again, in Romania. More and more of his memories come back every day, and he even builds something like a life for himself in the shitty Bucharest apartment that is almost starting to feel like a home.

And then all it takes are a few short words to make him try to kill Steve with a fucking helicopter. That can never happen again. He won’t let it.

So if there’s even the slightest chance that the words can be used to control him again, he doesn’t want to be conscious. He explains this to Steve when they get to Wakanda and he thinks Steve is starting to understand, but he still doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t try to convince Bucky not to do it, either. Steve puts his trust in Bucky as a person who is capable of making his own decisions, and Bucky loves him for that.

As much as it hurts right now, Bucky closes his eyes knowing he’s doing the right thing. The safe thing. He’s not technically falling asleep, but there’s a slight upward curve to his lips as he loses consciousness, and for the first time in more than seventy years, he’s at peace.

**Seventeen/Семнадцать**

When the creators of the _Captain America_ comic books find out about the Howling Commandos, they take a few creative liberties. Apparently the idea is to inspire more kids to join the army straight out of high school, and to provide an American counter to the Hitler Youth and its pervasive influence on children.

Which Bucky supposes he can get behind. But when they find out that he’s been reimagined as a seventeen-year-old boy sidekick in a mask who says things like “Golly, Cap!” and “Gee whiz!” Steve laughs until he cries.

Bucky laughs too, but privately, he doesn’t think the comic’s all that far off the mark. Bucky might have been bigger and stronger and more popular than Steve, but he’s always the one trailing around after him, even when they are kids. Most women don’t look twice at Steve once they realize they can see over the top of his head, and Steve is too likely to pick fights with mouthy strangers at the pictures to make many friends among other men. Bucky quickly learns to check the alleys and parking lots as he passes, just to make sure Steve isn’t starting something he can’t finish. He pulls Steve out of more than a few beatings that way.

The kind of men who beat on someone smaller then them are also the kind of men who are always calling Steve “fairy” and “invert.” It could be Steve’s fine features, his long lashes and high cheekbones, but mostly Bucky thinks the men don’t like the way Steve refuses to lie down and take whatever they give him. Either way, it doesn’t win them any favours in Steve’s books. It’s not that he really minds getting called those particular names — Steve and Bucky go dancing at the St. George Hotel near their apartment once in a while, where they have the best parties in Brooklyn but where it's also an open secret that a couple of fellas can get a room together without any fuss. The queens there love Steve to pieces. He comes over all shy and pleased, and for once he's the one to charm up free drinks for the pair of them.

Steve just brushes those kinds of insults off most of the time, but the hate they are injected with still bothers him. He and Bucky know people who’ve been beaten nearly to death outside the St. George for a lot less than a pretty face and a smart mouth. Steve might be able to ignore an insult directed at himself, but God help the poor sucker who said something nasty about a woman, or about Bucky, for that matter. Steve would fight a moving train if it tried to insult Bucky.

Steve has always been troublemaker. He says he’s standing up for the little guy (as if there are any guys littler than him) but Bucky wonders if he isn’t just spoiling for a fight so he can prove that he’s capable of scrapping with the best of 'em. Steve is the one who breaks the law and lies on his enlistment forms so he can get rejected by the army five different times.

When the war in America begins in earnest, Bucky doesn’t tell Steve that he gets drafted. He can’t bring himself to, not after watching Steve make attempt after failed attempt to sign up out of his incorrigible sense of duty. When Bucky comes home one day with his instructions to head out to Basic, Steve assumes that Bucky enlisted, and Bucky just… doesn’t bother to correct him. He knows his love for his country was never as strong as his love for Steve.

Bucky would never leave Steve, not if he has the choice. Not when it’s Bucky who picks up most of the rent despite Steve’s vehement protests because Steve can’t handle heavy lifting and dock work pays better than sign-painting anyhow. Not when he needs to be there to go to the corner store and get Steve’s medicine because Steve’s fever is getting dangerously high and he's coughing so hard he can barely breathe. Not when Steve has come so close to dying that he’s been given last rites twice, and now that Sarah’s gone Bucky’s the only one he’s got left.

At least, that’s what he tells himself. Looking back, Bucky wonders if maybe he was always the one who couldn’t manage without Steve.

Bucky has always been just a little envious of Steve’s goodness, his willingness to fight and die if necessary to uphold what he believes in. That’s something Bucky has never had. Everything Steve went through — being forced to dance like a puppet on strings when all he wanted was to really serve, then the war itself, then waking up in a different century where everyone he knew was dead or dying — it could have made Steve bitter and cynical and so fucking angry all the time, but it didn’t. Steve is who he chooses to be: a good man, and Bucky doesn’t know if he could ever be that strong.

Even after the serum, all of it is only amplified. Steve’s goodness becomes greatness. His willingness to fight becomes reckless courage that sends him on what should be a suicide mission into Austria. Steve goes in for one man, for Bucky, and comes out with over a hundred men, and Bucky doesn’t know if he could ever be that brave.

So when they’re in that bar in London and Steve asks him to go back to the fight, he says yes. He can do this for Steve, he thinks as the two of them clink their glasses together. He has to.

As Sergeant Barnes, Bucky’s often the one who gets his hands dirty so Captain America doesn't have to. Not that Steve doesn’t throw himself wholeheartedly into every one of the Commandos’ missions — of course he does. He does more than he should, probably. But war has a dark and dirty underbelly that is never advertised in the USO performances or the newsreels that show before the pictures, and that’s where Bucky comes in. There are some things that Senator Brandt doesn’t want the shining bastion of American idealism to be seen doing.

So Bucky takes the kill shots for Steve when he can and he doesn’t lose any sleep over them because he knows he’s got Steve’s six and that’s what matters.

That doesn’t go away after HYDRA hijacks his mind. Just as Dr. Erskine’s serum amplified Steve’s goodness, Bucky’s loyalty, his protectiveness and his instinct for brutal efficiency also get a boost thanks to Zola’s version. HYDRA takes his memories, but they don’t take the things that make the Winter Soldier a more effective weapon, and some of those things were part of Bucky long before he ever fell from the train.

As the Winter Soldier, these qualities make him better able to hurt Steve. But as Bucky Barnes, they make him better able to protect him. He’s okay with being the one to hold the gun while Steve holds the shield if that’s what it takes to keep him safe — or as safe as possible anyway. One takes attack and one takes defence, and the two of them will keep looking out for each other because that is what they do.

**Daybreak/pассве́т**

He never sees the sun except when he’s on daylight missions. They keep him in stasis most of the time, and even when he’s awake, his training takes place in a dark bunker concealed in the side of a Siberian mountain.

As carefully as HYDRA crafts their living weapon, they don’t give a shit about his physical health beyond his ability to carry out orders. They feed him precisely enough calories to maintain his muscle mass, so while he doesn’t starve, he’s never quite full. They rarely let him sleep. His skin is pale and clammy; his eyes are dull and shadowed with heavy circles. His overlong hair hangs lank and unkempt around his sallow face. They don’t want him to grow a full beard — they wouldn’t be able to muzzle him like a violent dog with facial hair in the way — so every once in a while they take a razor to his jaw. It’s quick but it’s not very effective, and the stubble grows in patchy and uneven over the nicks. They don’t bother to bathe him, but they do hose him down with cold water when he gets filthy enough that the smell starts to bother his handlers. The blood and sweat sluice off his naked body and through a drain in the floor.

They tell him he’s fighting for the dawning of a new era. The day the sun will rise over the glorious Soviet empire. He’s starting to forget what a sunrise looks like.

*        *       *

As Bucky looks back on the memories of his various missions through the glasses, he starts to notice something. It becomes clear as he watches himself flip a knife through the air toward the man on the bridge in Washington, DC — toward Steve. Bucky thinks he can see something of himself around the Winter Soldier’s eyes. His hands are intent on his mission, but like the unsuspecting tourists who think they can handle the Cyclone at Coney Island, his eyes are screaming to get off the ride. His mouth is set in a firm and uncompromising line, but the wild panic in his eyes is clear. He is a passenger in his own body, and he wants out.

He's fighting, Bucky realizes. The whole time, from the very beginning, there was a part of him trying to get free, to end it, to stop hurting people. Bucky feels a little twinge of hope. It’s comforting to know that there was always a part of him, even trapped under the weight of what HYDRA was forcing him to do, that wanted to see the sun again.

**Furnace/печь**

This one is Arnim Zola’s attempt at irony. HYDRA had decided on the codename “Winter Soldier” for their super-soldier program when it first began in the dying months of the Second World War. When he calls him the new fist of HYDRA, Zola remarks that winter was everything they were training him to be — cold, brutal, dispassionate, implacable.

One November evening, they give him a blanket, a canteen of water and a handful of hard biscuits. They shove him outside the bunker and lock the door behind him, and he’s alone for the first time in years. The idea is to test his survival instincts and abilities — they’ve invested too much time and money into their weapon to have him die because he forgot that he still needs to keep warm.

They watch, pleased, as he begins digging a rudimentary shelter for himself in the side of a snowbank. His metal hand quickly carves out a sizeable depression in the frozen ground, and within minutes he’s wrapped in the blanket and bedded down for the night.

He doesn’t sleep, but he doesn’t die. His lips and fingernails are purple with cold when the handlers fetch him at dawn the next morning, but he’s still alive. He even remembers to leave a vent in the snowpack covering his shelter so that he can breathe. His handlers are impressed, so much so that they let him sit in front of the blazing fire in Zola’s office for a whole hour.

His training is complete. The chemical doses and the torture have seared him from the inside out. It has taken a crucible in the heart of the Siberian winter to finally purge everything that had once made him a person. Even his body is a measure of opposites; his flesh a little warmer than average, the metal of his left arm a little cooler.

They have forged him in fire and tempered him in ice but even they do not know how fiercely what is left of his mind still burns.

*        *       *

Now, Bucky thinks of a different warmth, and a different cold. He remembers a freezing winter in northern Italy in 1943, and the image forms around him. The Howling Commandos have spent the day storming a HYDRA base near Milan. They’ve taken the base, but at a heavy cost: the hundred or so civilian POWs they had been supposed to rescue were executed as they made their approach.

Everyone’s feeling the loss when they make it back to their camp in a forest on the outskirts of the bombed-out city, but Steve takes it the worst. He’s silent and stony-faced as they get ready for bed, and Bucky can tell that he blames himself. To cap it all off, Dum Dum broke his wrist during the attack and is letting everyone hear about it, and the delivery truck with that week’s rations and letters from home is three days late.

Spirits are already low, and then the storm front hits. They’re bundled up two to a tent when the wind reaches them and it’s the coldest Bucky can ever remember being, including that January when their apartment building’s boiler broke down. The wind shrieks through the skimpy trees, buffeting their tent so hard the pegs creak. Bucky’s cold down to his bones, shivering violently against a chill he can’t shake. It doesn’t help that he lost too much weight while he and the rest of the 107th were held captive in Austria, much of which he still hasn’t managed to gain back.

Bucky is curled into a ball in his mummy bag with his hands fisted and tucked under his armpits when he hears a rustling beside him. He turns and sees a hulking shadow standing up from the cot next to his.

“What’re you — ?” Bucky starts, but Steve silences him with a quiet “It’s okay, Buck, it’s just me.” As if it could have been anyone else.

Steve undoes the fasteners until there’s enough room for him to slide in behind Bucky. It’s a tight squeeze — the mummy bag was definitely not made for two — but they manage, and Steve throws his own wool blanket over them before wrapping an arm snugly around Bucky’s waist. They’re pressed shoulder to hip with their legs tangled together, Steve’s knee between Bucky’s parted thighs and Bucky’s head resting on Steve’s outstretched arm. He can feel Steve’s wince against the back of his neck when he touches Bucky’s icy skin.

“This is payback for all the times you had to warm me up, isn’t it?” Steve asks, and Bucky can smile now, because Steve is like a furnace against his back. His muscles unclench, his jaw relaxes, and without even meaning to, Bucky nuzzles himself into the wonderfully warm body behind him. Steve runs several degrees hotter than a normal person now, something to do with his increased metabolism.

“Nah,” he says. “If we’re counting, I think I’ve still got a few dozen cold nights on you.”

“Probably more than that.”

Steve’s right, Bucky thinks. It seemed like every other night from November to March, Steve would be shivering in his sleep on the other side of the only bedroom in their tiny apartment, wracked with coughs from pneumonia or bronchitis or who even knew what else. Back then, Bucky would be the one to keep Steve warm, wrapping his body around Steve’s much smaller one and holding him until the shaking stopped.

Bucky can feel Steve’s heartbeat against his back. It’s strong and steady through the thin cotton of his shirt, so different from the erratic fluttering that sometimes made Steve pass out when they were kids. Bucky breathes to its rhythm and his eyelids drift shut.

Steve takes his hand in the growing warmth, interlacing their fingers and deftly stroking the pad of his thumb across the fine scars that criss-cross over the back of it. Bucky’s scars are relics of dock work, and breaking up Steve’s fights, and that time a particularly mean alley cat got the better of him. More recently, military service and Zola’s operating table left scars of their own.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Bucky says. “We save as many people as we can, and sometimes that doesn’t mean everyone.”

“I know,” Steve replies, dejected. “I still hate it though. I helped Falsworth and Morita bury their bodies. Some of them were just - just _kids_.” The last word comes out as a strangled sob, and Bucky knows there’s nothing he can say that will make it better. He turns his hand in Steve’s so he can give it a comforting squeeze, then he lets Steve cry.

After a few minutes, Steve wipes his eyes on his shirt collar and lets his head drop onto the thin pillow, still cradling Bucky in his arms. “It’s still weird, being bigger than you,” Steve whispers into his hair. His words are so quiet under the screaming wind that Bucky can barely hear them. “Don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”

Bucky is mostly asleep when he murmurs, “I could get used to it.”

**Nine/Девять**

In their most recent incarnation, the Avengers operate with eight active members. Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, James Rhodes, Sam Wilson, Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton, Wanda Maximoff and the vibranium-and-synthetic-flesh being known as Vision have all fought together in various smaller groups and combinations before they disagree about the Sokovia Accords.

If the Accords had been the only point of conflict, Bucky doubts the dispute would ever have come to blows. It is only once Bucky becomes involved — once Zemo involves him, he corrects himself — that the group tears itself apart. He doesn’t choose it, but it’s still because of him that the team falls to pieces, friend turning on friend. He didn’t choose to kill as the Winter Soldier, but he still did it. He is the ninth, the odd one out, and he has never really been a member of the group. He is only its breaking point.

Because as strong and real as his other friendships and alliances are, Steve chooses Bucky over everyone else. He always chooses Bucky. Bucky might not feel like he’s worth all the trouble, might not feel deserving of Steve’s devotion, but Steve certainly thinks he is. Steve has lost Bucky so many times - when Bucky goes off to war, and then again when the 107th is captured. Bucky’s fall from the train. Their fight on the helicarrier, and Bucky’s subsequent two-year disappearance.

Bucky understands, because he’s lost Steve too. He leaves Steve behind when he is drafted. He watches Steve’s face get smaller and smaller above him as he falls from the train. He finds out Steve is - apparently - dead. Every time his mind is wiped, every time the words reactivate the Winter Soldier’s programming, every time he forgets, he loses Steve a little more. By the time Steve falls from the crashing helicarrier, Bucky has lost track of how many times they’ve been ripped away from each other. He’s lost track of a lot of things.

And then in Berlin, they finally fall together. Steve could let go of the helicopter — he should let go — but he doesn’t. He holds on, and for his trouble he goes crashing into the river below with Bucky at his side because he can’t bear to lose him. Not this time. Not again.

But when Steve tells him to run in Siberia, Bucky listens, even if he doesn’t make it very far. There’s a time when he would have refused, would have shouted “No, not without you!” and stayed at his side no matter what. It’s not that he doesn’t want to stay, but Bucky’s two years on his own are finally what it takes to grow him a healthy sense of self-preservation. Now if only the same could happen to Steve.

Steve never gives up on Bucky. Not when the American military tells him Bucky is as good as dead. Not when the government tells him Bucky is lost to HYDRA, which has been growing inside that same government all along. Not when his friends tell him Bucky is too dangerous to be allowed his freedom. Steve sees through the broken systems, with all their dismissal and their lies and their mistrust, until all that there is left to see is Bucky. When everyone tells him to move, Steve plants himself like a tree and says “No, you move.”

So rather than being blinded by his loyalty to Bucky, as many have accused Steve of being, maybe Bucky is just Steve’s only point of real clarity in a messy and violent world full of grey areas and ambiguity and compromise. If it means Bucky can be worthy of Steve, then he’s good with that.

**Benign/добросердечный**

Some time in the late fifties, HYDRA allows one of their new recruits, a young sleeper agent stationed in America, to work with the Winter Soldier for the first time. The man is tall and blond with broad shoulders and an easy grin. He’s as handsome as a movie star, and the Soldier thinks he’s seen him before, somewhere. As much as he is still capable of trust, he trusts this new man, and the rest of the team is amazed at how immediately and bonelessly obedient the Soldier is under his direction. The man even allowed to break protocol and talk to him a little, since he seems to be responding to it so well.

The man tells him that his name is Alexander Pierce. “You are a benign force,” Pierce says in English. It’s the first time the Soldier has heard that language spoken in a long time. “Your work will be a gift to mankind. You will shape the century.” The Winter Soldier thinks he’s heard words like that somewhere before, something about fighting evil and making the world a better place. That sounds good, he thinks, and he is ready to comply. 

*        *       *

Bucky knows, objectively, that what he did as the Winter Soldier is not his fault, but that doesn’t stop him from remembering every single one of his thirty-eight in-person kills with agonizing clarity. He can still feel Maria Stark’s windpipe collapse under his pressing fingers, as vividly as though her corpse were still cooling in the front passenger seat of her husband’s car on the side of a backcountry dirt road. She does not put up a fight. If anything, she bares her throat for him. He chokes the life out of her with his flesh hand instead of his metal one. Maybe it’s his way of thanking her for her lack of resistance.

He uses his metal hand on Howard Stark, though. Stark’s stunned “Sergeant Barnes?” just before the Soldier bashes his head in is equally seared into Bucky’s memory. He hears his real name spoken by a person he had once considered if not a friend, then at least a close acquaintance and ally, but still the Winter Soldier’s programming holds fast.

Bucky can accept that he is technically blameless, even a victim himself, but that doesn’t make the memories go away. He doesn’t even want them to go away really, which is why he turns down Dr. Okoye’s offer of shock treatment: he deserves to carry the memories. They are his rightful burden, his atonement.

It isn’t even so much that Bucky considers himself guilty of the kills themselves. It is that he had broken in the first place. He should have been stronger. He should have kept fighting, or better yet, he should have died rather than allow himself to be turned to such a vile purpose. Better dead as Bucky Barnes then alive as the Winter Soldier.

Now he is neither. He’s played both hero and villain in his time, and while he will never again be either of them in their entirety, maybe now he can be something in between. He may never lose the memories, but he may be able to learn to forgive himself. He can still be a good person. He doesn’t have to hurt people. He can be benign again.

Bucky has been either running for his life or fighting for his life for so, so long, and he’s tired. He doesn’t want to run or fight anymore, he just wants to live. He just wants to buy his goddamn plums.

Maybe that’s the same reason why Steve leaves his shield in the Siberian bunker: not because he is unworthy of carrying it, but because it has become so heavy that he no longer can. Steve is the strongest person Bucky has ever known, but even he must have a limit. Even he must want to rest. After all, isn’t it enough to die for your country once?

Even though his name is Captain America, it’s been a long time since Steve has fought to uphold the ideals and interests of his nation. Maybe he never did. Maybe what Steve has really been fighting for the whole time, since back when he was a skinny little shit with a trash can lid for a shield, is people. Individuals. There will always be people around to fight for after he has had a rest.

Steve doesn’t have the shield anymore, and Bucky doesn’t have the arm, but haven’t they already carried those burdens for too long? Maybe it’s time to set them down, if not for good, then at least for now. Maybe it’s time for Steve and Bucky to give up the fight and just remember what it feels like to live.

**Homecoming/возвращение на родину**

In 1960, the Winter Soldier goes rogue during a mission. He’s in Washington, tracking down a politician for…some reason. They never tell him the reasons. It’s one of his earliest missions, and it’s the first time he is ordered to kill rather than conduct unobtrusive reconnaissance from a distance. Bucky doesn’t remember exactly what set it off even now. It could have been a flash of blue eyes, or the smell of strong black coffee, or maybe it’s just that it was his first time back Stateside since before the war.

Whatever it is, the Winter Soldier feels a sudden moment of clarity so strong he has to grab hold of a nearby railing to keep from stumbling. When he unclasps the fingers of his left hand, carefully concealed in a glove, the railing’s twisting cast-iron curlicues are bent out of shape. Abruptly, the mission parameters shift from Objective: Sanction to Objective: Return, but he doesn’t go back to the D.C. hotel where he is supposed to meet his handlers. Instead, an unshakeable pull urges him north and he obeys, hopping a train even though he has no idea what he’s doing or why.

He never does find the politician, though he learns later that someone else got him a few years after that.

It takes the Winter Soldier’s handlers nearly six weeks to track him down. When they do, he’s sitting on the front stoop of a shabby apartment building near the waterfront in Brooklyn, New York, with the same blank, vacant expression he wears whenever he’s completed a mission and is waiting for new orders.

They take him back to Siberia, where they are promptly executed for their incompetence and replaced with a new team. Alexander Pierce is promoted and becomes his primary handler. Before the Winter Soldier is put back on ice, a new word is implanted into his programming. It is a reminder to them of what nearly went so disastrously wrong, and a reminder to the Soldier that he will always return home.

*        *       *

But Bucky thinks of it differently now. Home isn’t an apartment in Brooklyn or one in Bucharest, and it certainly isn’t an underground lab in the remote reaches of Siberia.

No. Seventy years ago and fifty years ago and two years ago and last month and right now, home is the man Bucky will always go back to, even when he doesn’t know his own name.

The glasses take him to moment after moment in brief flashes as they cross his mind one after another: the skinny, scrappy kid who will fight anything that moves if Bucky isn’t there to stop him. The man on the bridge who pries at the cracks in the Winter Soldier’s conditioning with a single word. The one who grounds a helicopter with the strength of his arms and the force of his will to keep from losing Bucky again. He is his home: clear blue eyes and big hands and the kindest heart, the man he loves so much he sometimes can’t breathe around it.

Home is Steve Rogers, and that’s not something Bucky Barnes will ever forget again.

**One/oдин**

The numbers might have started out as a neutral framework on which to craft his subservience, but the last comes to mean this: one mission, one master, one Motherland. They take everything else and leave him with that to hold on to, and it might very well be what keeps him from falling to pieces entirely.

Now Bucky will have to find his own mission, and this time, it will be a mission that he chooses for himself. Bucky has had his freedom of choice stripped from him for so long, ever since he was first conscripted into the army. He’s already made one choice, and now that he’s no longer frozen, the opportunities to choose will never stop. The prospect is as daunting as it is exhilarating, but he’s looking forward to getting used to it.

He has to learn to be one once again, which is something he hasn’t been in a very long time. He has to take the many versions of himself that have existed over the decades — the civilian and the sergeant and the Winter Soldier and now just Bucky — and somehow distill them into the person he wants to be. One whole person. Maybe even one happy and healthy person, if he’s lucky.

That’s going to take time, and he knows it. It might mean he and Steve have to spend a little time away from each other once in a while so Bucky can figure it out. Maybe they’ll never be _steveandbucky_ like they once were, but that’s okay. These days, _steveandbucky_ means beating Tony Stark very nearly to death with a shield that passes between them as easily as a glance, fighting as one unit and one being. _Stevandbucky_ is dangerously brutal and unrelenting and uncompromising in the face of a threat to either of its halves. They’ve both lost each other so many times that neither is strong enough to do it again, so they lean on each other for support as they walk out into the Siberian cold because each is all the other has left.

It’s not that Bucky wants to be separated from Steve. They’ve both been fighting far too long and have lost too much to ever want to be apart again. But it’s not good enough for _steveandbucky_ to each be half of a whole. They each have to learn to be one before they can be two, because if Bucky’s not enough without Steve, he’ll never be enough with him.

**Freight Car/грузовой ваго́н**

This one, Bucky thinks, is probably self-explanatory. His fall, his death, the beginning of his training as the Winter Soldier. No wonder they pick it as the final trigger word, the point where everything that is _him_ falls away and he makes the last leap into total compliance. It should be impossible to find any good memories or feelings to attach to the phrase, and maybe it is. Bucky knows he will never again be the person he was before he fell. The man who flirts as easily as he breathes and drags his reluctant friend on double dates and wears his dress uniform’s hat at a deliberately jaunty angle is dead, and Bucky can never be him again — not completely.

Would he even want to go back, Bucky wonders, if he had the choice? If he could do it all again but die for real at the bottom of that mountain gorge, his body breaking to pieces on the rocks with Steve’s face the last thing he ever sees?

Even if they had both survived the war, he and Steve would both be dead now. It’s easy to envy the life they might have had. Steve would have married Peggy Carter liked they both deserved, and Bucky would have found a way to be okay with that. He probably could have been truly happy for them, given a little time.

But Peggy’s dead, and by all rights he and Steve should be dead too, but they aren’t, and they’re both going to have to live with being not dead, at least for now.

Steve and Bucky are alive, but it’s more than that: they have each other. They’re conscious and they’re together and they’re safe and Bucky thinks they might actually have a pretty good chance making things work if they play their cards right, which is more than he could have hoped for even six weeks ago.

So no, he wouldn’t go back. He’ll take the sum of his whole life, the best of it and the worst, if it means ending up where he is right now. If Bucky can’t find happiness in the words, maybe he can find acceptance. Just like the train hurtling along the mountainside at a hundred miles an hour, he can only go forward.

**Epilogue**

When the lights come up, all Bucky can register is a curious mix of elation and complete exhaustion. He can’t move, not because he’s restrained, but because his body feels so heavy it’s like it’s plastered to the metal table. He can’t tell how much time has passed. A few minutes? The whole morning? Bucky has no idea.

It’s like he just woke up from one of those accidental three-hour naps he used to take during his teenage growth spurt, when he’d suddenly get so tired he literally couldn’t keep his eyes open. He’d pass out on whatever surface was closest — his bed, the floor, Steve — and wake up disoriented and wondering what year it was.

“Did it work?” he asks. His mouth feels like it’s full of sawdust. He wasn’t asleep during the procedure, nor was he unconscious, but the glasses seem to have put him into something like a meditative trance, and he might as well have been hauling weights all day for the soreness in his muscles.

“Everything went as we expected,” came Dr. Okoye’s voice from somewhere behind him. Her hands appear overhead and she removes the glasses. For the first time, he notices that her fingernails are painted a pretty shade of purple. “The EEG didn’t register any spikes in your brain activity, which is a good sign. You heart rate and blood pressure are normal.” She begins removing the electrodes from his head. Bucky feels something cold trickle down the side of his face and registers the strong smell of acetone, but Dr. Okoye wipes it away.

“Yeah, but did it _work_?”

“There is only one way to find out for sure, I’m afraid,” Dr. Okoye says. “It took you a little under two hours, which is slightly longer than we had estimated, but in fairness I suppose we did give you rather a lot to think about.”

After a minute or two the IV is out of Bucky’s arm and he sits up, fighting a wave of dizziness. One of the assistants hands him a glass of water, which he immediately downs. The dryness in his mouth subsides a little and he feels a little less groggy as they help him move to one of two chairs in the corner of the lab.

The lab door hisses again, and Steve and T’Challa enter. “I think we’re ready to test it, Your Highness,” Dr. Okoye says. She turns to her assistants. “Could you give us the room, please?”

When the door shuts behind them, Bucky turns to Steve. “I want you to do it, like we talked about,” he says. “If this doesn’t work…well, I want it to be you.”

“I’m ready,” Steve says. He’s holding a piece of paper that’s crumpled and torn around the edges. It looks like he’s been worrying it with his fingers. “Nat’s been drilling me tougher than Phillips ever did, but she says my pronunciation’s as good as hers now.”

Bucky had heard talk before he went under that Natasha Romanoff would be joining them in their self-imposed Wakandan exile.

“Let’s just do it.”

Steve settles into the chair across from his, and Bucky closes his eyes and listens as Steve says the words.

“ _Zhelaniye. Rzhavyy. Semnadtsat’. Rassvet. Pech’. Devyat’. Dobroserdechnyy. Vozvrashcheniye na rodinu. Odin. Gruzovoy vagon_.”

Natasha was right, Bucky thinks. Steve’s pronunciation is as solid as a native Russian speaker’s. His inflections are perfect, and he even nailed the soft consonants, which can be tricky to get right. He -

Oh.

_Oh._

Bucky’s mind should be a blank slate right now. He should be able to think of nothing but awaiting his mission objective. He should be ready to comply. But he’s not.

A wave of relief washes over Bucky, and he sags forward into Steve’s arms, shaking.

“Bucky?” Steve asks, alarmed. “Did it —?”

“Nothing,” Bucky says. He lets out a bark of laughter, and a few tears burn well the corners of his eyes. “They’re just words. They’re just words, Stevie. I’m free.”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at aladygrieve.tumblr.com


End file.
